


The Great Brakebills Bake-off

by enjolras_lexa



Series: Brakebills and Further (Q/E) [4]
Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Baking, Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Dating, Established Relationship, Fluff, Friendship, Inspired by The Great British Bake Off, Julia Wicker is a Good Friend, M/M, Multi, Quentin Coldwater Deserved Better, Romance, honestly really inspired by the great canadian baking show, mostly book canon, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:41:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25793035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enjolras_lexa/pseuds/enjolras_lexa
Summary: Has this been done yet? Oh well.Baking, dating, and shenanigans. Features Eliot and Margo fabulousness, Quentin and Julia being besties, and Todd being Todd.
Relationships: Margo Hanson & Eliot Waugh, Margo Hanson/Josh Hoberman, Quentin Coldwater & Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Kady Orloff-Diaz
Series: Brakebills and Further (Q/E) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1441177
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	The Great Brakebills Bake-off

Quentin was sitting in the common room of the Physical Kids’ Cottage that evening, reading _The World in the Walls_ for approximately the fiftieth time, when he heard the sound. Strangely enough it wasn’t the sound of people having sex upstairs. It was the sound of creaky floorboards. Like one soft, barely-audible footstep. At first he didn’t pay it any attention. Then he heard it again.

He lifted his nose out of the book. “Hello?” No one replied, but the creaking sound happened again. Louder.

“Is someone being creepy out there?”

He got up hesitantly to go investigate. The silence was unnerving. Rather than load up some kind of basic defense spell, for some reason his instincts told him to fling the book into the darkened hallway.

 _Great_ , he thought. _Now the ghost has a weapon._

He spun on the spot, intending to go upstairs and try to slow his heartrate enough to sleep.

“Bahh!” He jumped.

The figures in sparkly gold cloaks lifted their hoods and grinned. One of them was familiar at least.

“Margo,” Quentin said flatly. “You scared the shit out of me, what the fuck?”

“It was fun,” she replied, completely unapologetic. “Come with us if you want to live.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Josh,” Quentin sniped back, following her anyway despite all his instincts demanding he run as fast as humanly possible in the opposite direction.

“What can I say, he’s fun to bang.” Margo tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Follow, follow. Hurry, hurry.”

Quentin picked his way across the stretch of grass known as the Sea in his bare feet, hoping he wouldn’t step on any—yep, that was a nice big rock. Great. “Where are we going?” No response.

“This is gradually getting less funny, just so you know.”

“Q, I swear to goddess—”

He gave another Quentin-Coldwater-patented eye-roll-up-down-head-shake. “Shutting up now.”

Eventually they caught up with a gathering of some of the other magical adepts in Quentin’s year. The whole area was lit with these ridiculous torches that sent sparks flickering off into the night air, and at the centre of it all was none other than Eliot.

Yes, Eliot Waugh. Yes, the guy with the vests and the height and the perfect hair that Quentin had been obsessing about since the day of his entrance exam. That Eliot. The Eliot he’d been on exactly four dates with and had yet to even kiss.

“Welcome,” Eliot said grandly, somehow magically amplifying his voice. “Welcome one and all, to the Great Brakebills Bake-Off!”

“Oh!” Josh paused for effect, “The Great Brake-off!” Nobody took any notice.

Penny groaned. “Fucksake,” he muttered.

“This challenge,” Eliot went on, shooting Penny a dirty look or three, “Is composed of many elements such as honour, fealty, and courage, and will test your—“

“Yeah stop talking like that, El,” Margo interrupted, “What you’re testing is all of us’s ability to tolerate the theatrics.”

Eliot looked suitably admonished. “It’s a baking thing. Well, baking, cooking, drink mixing, et cetera et cetera. It’s like me.” He looked surprised when no one seemed to catch on. “Versatile,” he explained with a smirk.

Quentin’s face turned an unattractive shade of dark red.

“We’re the judges,” Margo filled in, “And you gotta please us. And as some of you may already know, I’m a tricky woman to please.”

“And you—” Eliot gestured at Quentin, Todd, Julia, Alice, Penny, Josh, and Kady, and the others whose names Quentin (and probably Eliot) hadn’t bothered to learn, “Are the contestants. Or victims, whichever term you prefer. Now some of the challenges will involve—”

“Sorry, Eliot?” Alice spoke up, “But is this mandatory?”

“And I thought Penny would be our little naysayer,” Margo said, almost seeming impressed.

“I just don’t think I’m the only one who doesn’t have time for this,” Alice said coolly. “Or who doesn’t feel the need to flout school rules and risk expulsion for silly pointless games.”

“We have the okay from Fogg, so don’t worry, you’re not risking getting your schoolgirl-skirted ass thrown out,” Eliot said with dripping condescension. “As I was saying, some of the challenges will involve testing everything from your reading comprehension to your magical aptitude to your willingness to perform fellatio on a well-hung water pixie. Well, maybe not that last one, but we’ll see how the week goes.”

“And most of the challenges involve magic, especially using magic in ways some of you first-years can’t wrap your brain around yet,” Margo finished. “But some of the challenges require Muggle kitchen-chops, so beware.”

“Needing to reattach fingers will not be a valid excuse for running out of time.”

“Plus the nail in the coffin: you’ll get extra credit. Which even the best and brightest and nerdiest of you can’t turn down.”

“Plus just by being here you’ve entered into a magical contract, not _unbreakable_ per se but not worth the consequences to your sex life if you break it.”

Eliot and Margo exchanged a look. “Onward,” Eliot said grandly, “to gLORY!”

Quentin washed his hands thoroughly, dried them on a tea towel, then rubbed the lingering sleep out of his eyes and had to do the process over again. He still didn’t know how he’d gotten roped into this. Or yes, he did. Eliot was hot, and Margo was scary, and he needed the extra credit. His Old Church Slavonic was shit.

Still, 6 A.M. was a truly unholy hour.

“Goooooood morning angels,” Eliot quipped.

“Good morning Eliot,” they sing-songed back. Some of them said Charlie. 

He looked far too well-rested, or maybe it was just his presumed amazing skincare routine. “Since it’s early as fuck, we thought we’d start by making coffee.”

“You have half an hour to brew some truly magical cups of joe,” Margo chimed in, “Without using even one metaphorical drop of magic. Ready?”

“Set.”

“Balls!” they said in unison.

Luckily Quentin had used to work as a barista. He had this in the bag.

****

Eliot had asked Quentin out for coffee about a week into the school year. Which was weird, because since term had started Eliot had been hanging out with his Physical Kid friends and blowing Quentin off completely. But which was cool, because Eliot was hot and smart and so confident it drew Quentin toward him like a kid to an ice cream truck. Or maybe more like a helpless moth toward an open flame.

Eliot had looked so relieved. “Oh good, you’re not straight then. Margo said you probably were.”

Quentin was taken aback. “Well, I mean I usually tend to date girls. But not always. Bisexuality, you know?” _Oh my god stop making a fool of yourself in front of the gorgeous man._ “So….yeah,” he added on for no apparent reason.

Eliot didn’t seem to mind. “High strung supernerds are so cute,” he said.

They’d gotten permission to leave campus and spend a day in the city. 11am coffee at a pretentious little café turned into 1pm lunch at a bistro, which turned into browsing at a bookstore (or really Quentin salivating over pretty hardcover fantasy books while Eliot browsed the classics. To Quentin’s delight, Eliot ended up getting a YA romance of the paranormal love triangle persuasion, then swearing him to secrecy forever). It was perfect.

But at the end of the day they came back to Brakebills. Quentin had kind of been hoping to be invited into the Cottage for a nightcap, but Eliot hadn’t even asked to hold his hand.

After about a week of radio silence, Quentin asked Eliot out. Actually, that was too smooth a descriptor for what had actually transpired.

“Doyouwannahangoutthisweekend?” he blurted.

Eliot blinked. “Yeah, I don’t think I caught that.”

“Do you want, that is if you don’t mind, like if you’re not busy, uh, like, wanna hang out? It’s been a while.”

“Oh Quentin, that was so not asking him out,” Julia said. She was laughing at him openly, tilting her head so that her long wavy hair spilled down her shoulders.

Quentin shook his head as if to rid himself of those pesky residual crush feelings. “I tried my best, okay?”

“So what ended up happening?”

“We took some food out of the main hall and snuck out a bottle of wine, and went out in one of those little canoes like we did that one time before the start of the semester.” Quentin scratched his temple. “It was really nice.”

“But was it a _date_?” Julia asked.

“I mean what else could it have been?” Quentin was getting annoyed. “A nice platonic picnic on the river with your bro? Come on.”

“Okay, okay, fair. But did he make a move?”

“Nope.”

“Did you?”

“Nope.”

Julia groaned. “Whyyyyyy,” she shoved him, “What is wrong with you? You know you’re a catch, right? He’d be lucky to get someone like you.”

“What, screwed up? Gangly? Nerdy?”

She shoved him again. “Smart, sarcastic, kind, et cetera. A little self-absorbed but basically a good person in need of medicating his depression? Someone like that. Just be yourself, Q.”

 _Believe it or not, I’m trying,_ Quentin thought despondently. “He’s the king of sealing the deal! I’ve walked in on him having sex with random guys thrice! What the fuck is he waiting for?”

****

“What the fuck are they waiting for?” Quentin muttered under his breath.

Eliot and Margo were taking their sweet time taste testing their brandy snaps.

For something that ended up looking so simple, they were a bitch to make. Thank Ember and Umber for magic, otherwise he would’ve burned off half his fingers.

The two judges turned their fashionable selves from where they’d been whispering privately to one another back to face the group.

“Julia, Alice, yours were the best,” Eliot said with a kingly nod of the head. “You get full marks. Bravo.”

Quentin didn’t listen while the loser was named and unceremoniously kicked out of the white baking tent. He was only relieved it wasn’t him.

  
“For the technical challenge,” Eliot said with pride, “You will be asked to make cupcakes.”

Everyone in the room let out a sigh of relief. 

“Cupcakes?” Todd laughed. “Seriously? Who the fuck hasn’t made cupcakes before?”

“You guys are going down,” Josh said with his typical swagger, “I won the bake sale at my church three years in a row with my cupcakes. And they didn’t even have pot or meth or whatever in them.”

“Now listen carefully,” said Margo, “These ain’t your gramma’s cupcakes. They need to have booze, at least three different kinds.”

“And since you’ll be making twenty-four cupcakes total, that means eight cupcakes in each flavour.” Eliot and Margo exchanged a look. “Twenty four cupcakes.....”

“In an hour,” finished Margo. “With decorations and icing and shit, and make ‘em pretty so’s I actually enjoy popping them in my mouth.” She leant forward and spread her arms to either side. “So you dickwads better get cracking.”

Margo and Eliot each took a generous bite out of their sample cupcakes, whisky and lemon liqueur respectively, and posed like they were judges in a baking show on television before sweeping out of the tent with their signature style.

“Jules,” Quentin began, nudging her. His brain was whirring. “Twenty four cupcakes in an hour— it’s totally impossible.”

“So we’re screwed, we get it,” Penny said.

“No, it’s _impossible_.” Quentin looked at the small group gathered around him.

“Yeah, Q?” Julia frowned. “We’re gonna need a little more than that.”

It was just so obvious, he didn’t see how the others couldn’t see it.

“They totally want us to cheat.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Pretty please leave a kudos and/or a comment if this didn't suck


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